Fuhgedabouddit

The attitude dictates that you don't care whether she comes, stays, lays, or prays. I mean whatever happens, your toes are still tappin'. Now when you got that, then you have the attitude.
-- Mike Damone - Fast Times At Ridgemont High


Well, after a couple of days off visiting the P's Your Humble commentator is back in the saddle again.

I decided to take some advice and ignore others. If you all remember, I set my stoploss at $200 as the point I would fall back to the 50/1 tables. I'm going to stick to that right now and stay with the 1/2 tables unless that happens. The 50/1 action is just entirely too random for me. At least at the 1/2 level, there's some semblance of intelligence there. I have found lately all that's left at the 50/1 level is completely clueless folk who will play any two cards and miracle a hand, and higher level players who have dipped down to the bottom of the aquarium to blow off some steam and fuck around with the NewBs.

What I did do was knock off playing multiple tables for the time being. My game was starting to suffer as a result of playing too fast. I'm still playing the 1/2 6 max for now.

I also took Poker Nerd's advice and covered up my "stack" with a post-it. This I think made a HUGE difference in my game today.

Today was one of those "en fuego" sort of days. I'm at work again, so I have to think of these off the cuff. For the first hour and a half or so, I saw almost 40% of the flops and won money at showdown 100% of the time. The deck was hitting me upside the head. As mentioned above, I took a post-it note and covered up my buy-in. I had absolutely no idea what my stack looked like, and subsequently, I didn't care. It was a hugely liberating feeling. As soon as I read this piece of advice from PN, I immediately started thinking about how I do seem to adjust my game depending on my stack size. If I'm down, I tend to loosen up, and if I'm up I tend to try to protect that profit. Both are bad ideas, and by not having any idea where I stood with my stack, I was forced to simply play the hand as it stood, not how *I* stood. An example. Let's say I'm holding something like AQo. The flop comes 63J. I bet and am called. The turn comes a 6, I fire another bet and am raised. If I had access to my stack size information, I would immediately start thinking "geez, I've already put 'x' in, and I need that pot to get back to a winning session" and I would probably call this raise and the river bet and be shown the obvious set of 6's. With my bank covered, I don't have a frame or reference. Am I ahead? Behind? Who cares. The moves I make don't change the number I can't see, since in my mind that buyin is gone. I'm forced to play the hand, and so I fold without batting an eye.

When I uncovered my stack size about 2 hours later, I discover that my $50 buyin was now $108.

Of course, the table I was on was outstanding. There must have been at least 6 people throughout the time I was on that table that had VP$IP percentages approaching or exceeding 70%. People were just chucking money at me, and since I had no reference, folding a blind bet and a shitty hand to a raise made no difference to me. I waited for the right moment and made them pay.

For some reason, Party wasn't sending me any hand histories. I opened up the Gametime window in Pokertracker and had PT request hand histories every 10 minutes so I could get some information into the gametime window, but alas, I never got any hand histories until well after the session. I can only wonder how much better I would have done with that information available in almost real-time!